All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the state wherein they reside. No state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws.
This is Section I of the 14th Amendment, which was passed by the Reconstruction Congress and ratified under dubious conditions by the Yankee States and carpetbagger legislatures in the Southern States. It was designed to keep the Southern States from making second class citizens out of the newly-freed slaves, and also to empower Congress to meddle in the States' affairs.
Courts struggled with this complex Amendment for years before finally concluding that the bold-faced language could only be workably construed as incorporating all the previous Amendments and rendering states subject to them. Thus, you have to plug in "State" where the 1st Am. says "Congress."
As any conservative legal scholar will tell you, the 14th Am. finished what Lincoln started: the complete destruction of the Founders' federalist system. Thus, when the federal courts divine a "right" to an abortion in the federal constitution, states are bound by it. When a federal court believes that neighborhood schools violate equal protection, forced bussing is ordered. When states want to experiment with welfare reform, they have to get by a battery of precedent which defines the "rights" of the state's welfare recipients. The 14th Am. empowers Congress to enact the freedom-destroying civil rights laws, the Am. w/ Disab. Act, etc., ad infinitum.
If we were ever to return to our original federalist, constitutional republican form of government, the 14th Am. would have to be repealed.
Well.....do I have to plug in local community?
Or - better yet, since the State bumps into an amendment no matter which way it turns, is the State in such a conflict of interest that separation of school and state is necessary? Again, the Constituionality of public schools is questionable.
A good case can be made that as an overwhelmingly believing society, our religous references and anchors within our institutions are of an organic and benign nature. It is only the establishment of Secular Humanism (designed as a religion by its founders) within the schools and elsewhere that then allows the prohibition of that incidental religous feature.
Our founders saw the moral dimensions of our character as being properly carried forward by public education. The notion of a public education that rejected basic common beliefs and general morals to placate a small minority of a contrived non-thiestic religion would have been a complete reversal of their intent and actions.
Except for that Black Sheep, the Second Amendment of Course. That one they rely on antebellum interpretations of the what governmental entities the Bill of Rights acts upon. Those decisions took the "Congress shall make no law" restriction in the first amendment, and applied to all the rest, when that is clearly not what was contemplated. They continue to do this, inspite of the clear and stated intentions of the authors and those who voted for the 14th amendment in Congress, that the second amendment, along with the other 8 of the first 9 Amendments be applied to the state (and local) governments.